Humble Inquiry, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

By Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein

This worldwide bestseller offers simple guidance for building the kind of open and trusting relationships vital for tackling global systemic challenges and developing adaptive, innovative organizations-over 200,000 copies sold and translated into seventeen languages!



We live, say Ed and Peter Schein, in a culture of tell. Rather than trying to genuinely relate to other people, we tell them what we think they need to know or should do. This is particularly problematic between superiors and subordinates because anybody anywhere could have that vital fact or spot that fatal flaw that could mean the difference between success or disaster.

Humble Inquiry encourages honest and open interactions, stimulates creative thinking, and protects against costly misunderstandings and mistakes. Edgar and Peter Schein defines Humble Inquiry as the fine art of drawing someone out . . . of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person. In this seminal work, the authors look at how Humble Inquiry differs from other kinds of inquiry, offer examples of it in action, and show how to overcome the cultural, organizational and psychological barriers that keep us from practicing it. This second edition has been updated throughout with new examples and a new chapter that shows how a lack of Humble Inquiry is at the root of so many modern organizational problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781523092642

Book preview

Humble Inquiry

THE HUMBLE LEADERSHIP SERIES

• Humble Leadership

• Humble Consulting

• Humble Inquiry

• Helping

Humble Inquiry

The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

SECOND EDITION | REVISED AND EXPANDED

EDGAR H. SCHEIN

and

PETER A. SCHEIN

Humble Inquiry, Second Edition

Copyright © 2021 by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein First Edition copyright © 2013 by Edgar Schein

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

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Second Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-9262-8

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9263-5

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9264-2

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-9265-9

2020-1

Book producer: BookMatters; Copyeditor: Tanya Grove; Cover designer: Susan Malikowski, DesignLeaf Studio

To Earth’s doctors, nurses, care providers, and health care administrators who have worked so tirelessly to protect humanity during this horrible COVID-19 pandemic.

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction: What Is Humble Inquiry?

1 To Boldly Tell or Humbly Inquire

2 The Humble Inquiry Attitude

3 How Is Humble Inquiry Different?

4 The Culture of Do and Tell

5 Cultural Do’s and Don’ts of Conversation

6 What Really Goes On in a Conversation

7 What Goes On inside Your Head?

8 Developing the Attitude of Humble Inquiry

Notes

Discussion Guide and Exercises

Twelve Mini Case Studies to Illustrate Humble Inquiry

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Authors

Preface to the Second Edition

The motivation to write a second edition of this book continues to be personal and professional for both of us. We can see in today’s and tomorrow’s world more reasons than ever why Humble Inquiry—the gentle art of asking questions to which we don’t already know the answer—must be practiced to build better relationships and to help others to untangle the complex situations we are confronted with daily.

What is new in this second edition is a deepening and broadening of this concept, seeing it as both a set of guidelines for to how to ask better questions and as an entire attitude that includes better listening, better responding to what others are trying to tell us, and better revealing of ourselves to facilitate positive relationship building that leads to more effective problem-solving in our daily interactions. And we need to do more of this than ever because our cultural scripts continue to push us in the wrong direction, toward thinking we know the answer and feeling that it is appropriate to tell it to others as if it is the truth.

Is it inevitabile that as the world becomes more interlinked and multicultural, most of the time we do not know what is really going on or why this is happening now? We hope that the deeper and broader approach to Humble Inquiry presented here will help you to see around and through the brazen telling provided by others, and to deepen the skills to learn what really matters.

Keeping up with the content of accelerating change is really hard. Naturally we all share the inclination to focus on what we know, on our industry, or on our area of expertise, where we can be comfortable keeping up with what is changing. Yet trying to keep up with the content of accelerating change may actually be less important than keeping up with the context of accelerating change. There is a real difference between the content question What changed? and the context question What is going on? or Why is this happening?

This is particularly important now because, as strange as this sounds, our reactions to right and wrong, fact or opinion, truth or lies, have evolved since the first edition of this book came out in 2013. This second edition begins with the same incident of someone telling Ed something that was neither helpful nor true. The person doing the telling had a strong need to tell, with, no doubt, good intentions to be helpful. At that time, Ed’s mild annoyance was the spark that lit the flame for the first edition, and the teller was easily forgiven for passionately expressing a point of view, even though the facts it was based on were not entirely accurate! The difference now, as we work on the second edition, is that the sense of what is truth and objective reality is itself being called into question with alarming regularity.

We have entered into a different relationship with right and wrong, with facts versus alternative facts, with empirical evidence versus opinion or belief. As long as humans have made decisions, we have formulated and relied upon these believed distinctions between right and wrong, reality and illusion. What has changed is that we are now more explicitly, or tribally, encouraged to challenge the other view, regardless of the empirical scientific evidence supporting either view. Have we come to believe, now more than ever, that telling is the way to lead?

Part of the acceleration of change, therefore, is the increased tendency to trust our passion about a belief, even sometimes in contradiction to the scientific basis. In the hyper-partisan and tribal public square, the force with which beliefs are expressed seems to matter even more than the facts and their basis in science. Whether it’s climate crisis or pandemic—two profound challenges of our current physical world—the partisan perspective, or context, too often overpowers or outshouts the science in matters that have actual impact on our lives. It is as if inconvenient or threatening realities matter less than how rigidly, consistently, and tribally the alternative views are argued and demonstrated. For some, the point is more about winning the argument, about us and our view than it is about truths that can be checked, verified, and agreed upon. It seems increasingly the case that the last thing that some want is to agree because there is more to be gained by continuing to amplify the argument and reinforce the division between us and them. More than ever, the increased use of Humble Inquiry can become an essential learning process to collectively discover the essential elements of shared experience that we can live with and progress within.

This global divisiveness has accelerated at least as fast as the rate of change we have experienced since the first edition. What may be most perilous about this tribalism is that it makes it okay to not learn or relearn. If there is one rationale we can offer above all for reading this book, it is this: through Humble Inquiry you can learn more about what is happening in your work and in your life, and you can learn to consistently separate the signal from the noise. In a world that inevitably confuses fact with alternative fact and fiction, we hope this book will help you learn in your conversations and relationships what really matters to the people you care about and need to care about. With added inquiry and reflection, you can also learn new things about yourself.

And Humble Inquiry might also help you relearn how to learn. You may discover that there is more actionable information in the details of what’s really going on than in simply knowing what happened or what has changed. Relearning how to inquire, listen, reflect, and then act, is what the Humble Inquiry attitude is all about. A deep thinker about the future, Bob Johansen describes a polarity between certainty and clarity. Certainty is the belief and adherence to a point of view, often accompanied by vehement argument. Clarity is being able to see and learn more of what is really going on, the full spectrum of dimensions that emerge as critically important as events unfold.¹ We add that seeing with more clarity and abandoning certainty are benefits of a Humble Inquiry attitude.

To facilitate this learning, this edition provides new stories and illustrations to further illuminate the Humble Inquiry concept. You will also find more exercises and suggestions for learning and practicing Humble Inquiry. One thing that is not new but cannot be stressed enough is that Humble Inquiry is both an attitude and a process. It is not an algorithm or set of rules. Though the term itself is not new, the nuances and complications associated with practicing this form of communicating and relationship building can be applied in new situations everyday. We can all learn to be better humble inquirers.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is for anyone who is seeking more productive positive relationships, looking for new ways of understanding what is really going on, or wanting to be more helpful. Of course all of us could benefit from more productive relationships, new ways of understanding, and learning how to be more helpful. However, people in leadership roles particularly need to hone these skills because this art of inquiry becomes more challenging as power and status increase. Our culture emphasizes that leaders set direction and articulate values, all of which predisposes them to tell rather than ask. Yet it is such leaders who may need Humble Inquiry most because intricate interdependent tasks require building positive, open, and trusting relationships above, below, and around them, in order to facilitate safer and more effective task performance and innovation in the face of a perpetually changing context.

How This Book Is Organized

In the first few chapters we explain in greater detail what Humble Inquiry really means on a practical day-to-day basis. In Chapter 3 we sharpen this by contrasting Humble Inquiry with other forms of inquiry used by helpers and coaches. We dive into these questions: What are the social, cultural, and psychological forces at work that inhibit us from easy acceptance of this form of relationship building? To be humbly inquiring, what do we have to unlearn and relearn to be successful?

Chapter 4 digs into the cultural forces operating in us all the time, especially in the United States, and tries to show how this subtly encourages telling and inhibits Humble Inquiry. Chapter 5 elaborates this argument by analyzing how patterns in organizational hierarchies, and in society generally, create many of the rules that further complicate Humble Inquiry. These forces interact subtly with our own intrapsychic forces and cognitive biases to make open and honest conversations more challenging.

Chapter 6 examines in greater detail the subtle social dynamics of conversations, and Chapter 7 explores what happens inside our head in the few moments between when we observe something and when we react to it. All of this is intended to help you understand both why you may not be using Humble Inquiry when you should be, and what you might have to unlearn and relearn to improve your situational skills in conversations.

Reviews for Humble Inquiry, Second Edition

[Abdulsamad Alawi Abdalla · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

nice to read very understandable very helpful, the book that you must read if you want to communicate better